tell you I set you apart
by hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: Molly Hooper is very clever, very lonely, and very interested in dead bodies. Non-romantic/no pairing. May or may not expand into a series.
1. Chapter 1

Molly Hooper is very clever, very lonely, and very interested in dead bodies. She always has been, since she can remember. She likes corpses, likes the way they don't look at her as if she's stupid, likes the way they can't lie or say cruel things. The cadaver, she knows, is a great equalizer: some big strong men who pinch and wink and leer can't stand the sight of one, can't hack the smell or cut the flesh or probe the organs. They can't, but she can.

Always has been able to, since she was a child. Most fathers, when their daughters asked for a scalpel and a corpse for their twelfth birthday, would have panicked. Sent for a shrink, sent her away. But not her da, never. He bit back a gasp, told her she could have a scalpel when she'd been trained to use one, and took her to a local funeral home. Introduced her to the mortician and let her stay as long as she liked. She went home with a thick book on embalming methods, a new friend — the tall, dour, hunched embalmer having taken instantly to the tiny girl — and a new sense of certainty about who and what she was.

And so when she goes to university, she studies anatomy and chemistry and forensic science and a few other things. And when she graduates at the top of her class, she gets a job as a morgue attendant at Saint Bart's. And when she starts work, they warn her about the odd man who comes in sometimes — tell her to let him do what he wants, but he can't take the bodies out of the morgue, and he has to be supervised.

But when he comes in, angular and unearthly in his beauty, and proud and inhuman in his intelligence and his clarity and his cold clinical precision, Molly Hooper is suddenly and irrevocably lost. Because he's her, but taller and more brilliant. They're so alike, and he will never, ever see it, and she figures it out, eventually, but by then it is too late and she's letting him take corpses and work alone and trying so hard to look pretty and make him see her. And then he brings in that Army doctor and she sees it, understands it, and it's over for her, and something in her shatters forever and ever.

And then Jim, sweet, funny Jim from IT, with his calculated smiles and his perfect performance, and she knows he's hiding something but can't figure out what, so when he meets Sherlock and she watches him bumble and flirt, she thinks, "Oh, that's what it was," and when she finds out the truth, something else in her breaks again and Molly Hooper hides in her apartment for three weeks, crying and holding her cat and trying to decide, as she has for her entire life, if she'd be happier as a corpse or as a person who cuts into corpses.


	2. Chapter 2

That night, the night Molly Hooper decides she won't kill herself just yet, she dreams about her brother. Mikey, who was in some ways the spitting image of their da and in some ways his absolute opposite. And she dreams about the day that Mikey died.

The shrinks always thought it was Mikey's death that made her morbid. But they were wrong — they'd both been strange forever, Da showed the shrinks snapshots of Molly and Mikey hunched over anatomy books and drawings of skulls and souvenirs from dissections they'd done their whole lives. Molly was touched, really, that he'd kept it all: that he'd loved them for their oddness, not in spite of it.

And so the dream always starts with Mikey bringing her the last dead cat, the one he found in the old well when he was eight and she was six. And they laugh and play with it, steal Da's pocketknife to do an autopsy, and Mikey corrects her in his haughty older brother voice that it's a necropsy, not an autopsy, because autopsies are only for people. And Molly frowns at him, because he's being mean, and he says he's sorry and lets her do the first cut, but corrects her again and says it's an incision not a cut, and Molly gets so mad she tells him to do it himself, then, and storms away. And when she gets home, her da is crying and her ma is stone-faced, and it's then that she sees the policeman holding his hat in his hand, and she starts to scream.

Each time Molly Hooper has that dream, she wakes up screaming. And every time, she tries to calm herself down by reciting the bones of the hand. By picturing each of the bodies in the morgue and cataloguing their injuries. By closing her eyes and lying still and imagining herself in one of those boxes, sleeping and cold and safe. By feeding the cat and scrubbing the counters and watching TV on mute and clearing out the refrigerator. By talking to Mikey aloud, a little, not that he's listening of course, because he's dead, but it makes her feel better.

And usually, eventually, she calms down enough to go back to sleep. But since Jim, since the inquest and the explosion and all of it, she's been having trouble sleeping; the dream's come back, and her muscles seem to refuse to relax, and so Molly stays up all night and writes, the stupid little papers that no one reads, the ones about rates of decay in the dirtiest inlets of the Thames and about testing cartilage durability in obese former athletes' corpses and about locating a crime scene using particular strains of mold found in the lining of the nose. And they're good papers, even brilliant sometimes, but no one reads them. They remind her that she's smart and good at this, and they make her feel like being alive is that little bit better than a cool dark box at the morgue.


End file.
